1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mobile receiver including digital televisions and other mobile devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular telephones provided with image displays, which require driver software that may be downloaded over the air from a broadcasting station, and more particularly, relates to a method of transceiving driver software and an apparatus, such as a digital television, using the same.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
A digital television is a kind of mobile receiver that is generally provided with driver software installed at the time of sale to enable control of a user interface with the digital television and to provide the user with means for operating the television's various features. Besides digital televisions, other mobile receivers, for example, a PDA or mobile phone, also utilize driver software requiring a regiment of updating that continues over the life of the device, that is, after the time of sale. Driver software is essentially a program directly or indirectly associated with the driving of the apparatus in which it is installed.
After installation, driver software may be updated during an on-site visit by a service technician, or the updating may be performed by the user downloading the appropriate software from a manufacturer's website. To facilitate repeated and frequent updates, however, the driver software may be downloaded automatically, i.e., by the mobile receiver itself. Automatic updates of driver software may be enabled by a broadcasting station, which may embed the software in a stream of transport packets forming the broadcast signal or service, thereby transmitting the software over the air.
To facilitate over-the-air downloading, the broadcaster typically divides the software into a plurality of download data blocks (DDBs) to be transmitted together with a number of other broadcast signals, such as a video signal stream, various audio signal streams, additional data streams, or other software that may be associated with a television system. To enable the receiver side to identify specific software for downloading, the broadcaster assigns a specific packet identifier (PID) value to each packet of every download data block configuring the specific software to be downloaded. Thus, the software, which is identified as “software A” in FIG. 1, may be carried on one transport packet (TP) stream broadcast commonly to multiple users, i.e., digital broadcast receivers.
Referring to FIG. 1, the PID value of software A is set to, for example, “1,” for each of five download data blocks. That is, on the transmitter side, the data of software A is divided into a series of download data blocks, for example, five, which may be expressed as DDB 1-1, DDB 1-2, DDB 1-3, DDB 1-4, and DDB 1-5, and the transmission repeats this sequence of download data blocks as necessary. Thus, a single transmission of software A consists of multiple download data blocks interspersed in the broadcaster's TP stream, which typically includes repeated instances of the same series of download data blocks.
Then, the receiver side, e.g., a television, selectively receives (according to PID value) the DDB data having a predetermined PID value indicating software to be downloaded, performs error checking on the received data to correct errors as necessary, and stores the error-checked data. Considering television driver software divided as in FIG. 1, this reception operation may take as long as ten minutes to complete one cycle. After reception, however, there may be a detection of an uncorrectable error in any one of the transmitted download data blocks, such that the DDB data is only partially received. That is, there may be an unreceived download data block, in which case the above reception operation must be performed anew (reinitiated) using a subsequent transmission of the same DDB data having the specific PID value, such that download speed suffers considerably.